"Beady Eyes"

Picture from last night's Gumbo Fiction Salon reading. Sorry for the especially poor quality!

"Eyes on the prize, baby!" Marcos bellowed as he spun head first into the kaleidoscope crowd of Mardi Gras. He wasn't speaking to anyone in particular.

He was headed for the prize, though, where she was dancing on top of a table set outside a small cafe. A throng of men surrounded the table, all dropped to their knees as if engaged in worship right there on the sidewalk. Marcos was sure he knew why. She had collected so many strands of beads that she was now dancing with only beads covering what had to be covered. Her back, Marcos saw as her dance turned her around, was smooth and bare.

"Oh, they've got to be perfect," he said when he reached the edge of the reverent crowd. "Show 'em this way!"

The woman whirled and faced him; her hair swayed; her beads swayed. "I don't think you can handle it, little boy," she called.

"Oh, I can handle anything you've got," Marcos said.

So she smiled at him and began to pull her beads aside, a few strands at a time hooked around each thumb or finger. As the curtain parted, Marcos became aware not of a glimmer of flesh but of a gleam of light waiting behind the beads. It started as a small glow, like a candle's. It grew like a magnesium flame as strands of beads were lifted away, and suddenly Marcos knew, as the world went white and his eyes withered, that some things were not meant to be seen so easily.